To improve buckling stability and to prevent early elastic buckling of infill plates, vertical and horizontal plate stiffeners are designed for steel plate shear wall (SPSW) systems. Furthermore, effective design of stiffeners for SPSW systems results in improved structural behavior, such as increase of stiffness, capacity and energy absorption. In this paper, the effect of stiffeners is studied on SPSW structural behavior and consequently a rational method is proposed to determine the minimum required moment of inertia for stiffeners resulting in local buckling mode of the infill plate. The proposed requirement is then compared to results obtained from tests previously conducted, as well as those gained from finite element (FE) analyses performed for this study.
